


198. quicksand

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [57]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 02:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7871599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena and Sarah, driving through the desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	198. quicksand

It’s hot in the desert. The heat is like a punch to the face, an attack – and not the kind you could block, either. The kind you just have to take, where you reel backwards and hope that someday you stop bleeding.

They’re in a Jeep – Helena is in a Jeep, and Sarah is in a Jeep, and Helena-and-Sarah are in a Jeep. Together. Again. There are no windows in the Jeep, just space for air to come through, but it doesn’t matter: it’s hot anyways. The sun beats down on Helena’s head. She closes her eyes and let it lick at her eyelids.

“Where are we going,” Sarah says from the driver’s seat. Sarah’s voice is a shaky thing, uncertain, scared. Helena hasn’t asked her what happened in the prison camp after she left. Helena hasn’t asked why nobody followed them, or why Sarah hasn’t talked about Paul. Maybe later. Not yet.

“I don’t know, Sarah,” Helena says. Doesn’t say: _I just knew I had to come back to you_ , because Sarah would make that weird uncomfortable face she makes when Helena says things like that and Helena doesn’t want to do that to her. Not yet. So she opens her eyes, keeps talking. “I didn’t see a town, when I—”

The silence is filled with sun-claws, dangerous and burning. Helena’s mouth snaps shut. She tries again: “Before. Only desert.”

“There has to be one somewhere,” Sarah mutters. “You think if we keep headin’ west?”

Helena shrugs a little. It’s as good a plan as any. She sticks her head out the space where the window should be in the hopes that the desert wind will somehow cool off all the sweat on her face and the back of her neck.

“Hey,” Sarah says. “Stop that.”

“It’s hot.”

“Yeah, I noticed, thanks.”

Helena sighs and pulls her head back inside. It really does not make much of a difference. She rummages under the seat, looking for – ah! Some sort of nasty soldier-boy food bar, wrapped in shiny silver foil. She hasn’t eaten since she left, since before she left. She’s starving. She yanks off the wrapper and takes an enormous bite, chew-swallows.

Sarah laughs next to her, just one sound, joyous and slightly hysterical. Helena makes a curious _harumf?_ and Sarah just shakes her head. “Some things never change,” she says. “It’s been less than a bloody hour and you’re already eating again.”

“Oh,” Helena says.

“I was hungry,” Helena says.

“I know,” Sarah says, voice desert-warm and blooming with something. Not cactus, but Helena doesn’t really know what else grows in the desert besides cactus. She swallows the rest of her mouthful, which is suddenly dry and tasteless on her tongue.

“I’m sorry I left,” she says to the desert outside her not-window. Her hair whips around her face. It isn’t enough to hide her.

Sarah doesn’t say anything. Now would be a bad time for Helena to tell her that she only ate half the food bar, that she saved half for Sarah, now would be a very bad time for that. But she is. Sorry. And half the food bar is left, and she saved it for Sarah.

“I didn’t put you there,” Sarah says, voice tense and strained. Helena closes her eyes again, imagines the shape of Sarah’s knuckles on the steering wheel. The way they’d look like her voice sounds.

“I know,” she says. The wind whips her words away, but she knows Sarah heard them.

“So why’d you—” Sarah stops talking, words twisted off by anger. Helena sighs.

Here is a list of whys:

  1. The bullet
  2. Sarah’s face outside Cold River, when they pulled Helena into the police car
  3. Sarah’s whisper of _good girl_ when Helena managed to escape, like Helena was hers, like it had been her plan the whole time, like Helena had only been trapped in that prison camp in the first place so that she could set Sarah free
  4. The bullet
  5. The fact that Helena had ended up in the prison camp, which isn’t Sarah’s fault but which she can’t help blaming her for anyways
  6. The rebar
  7. The zip ties
  8. The bullet
  9. The way that Sarah does not call her _sister_
  10. The bullet



“I was going to come back for you,” she says, like a liar.

“You always do,” Sarah says quietly. “You always come back.”

  1. She hadn’t wanted Sarah to think that she would always come back



Outside the window: sand, wind, dust. Helena looks out anyways. Easier than saying things, maybe. Things can go wrong. They always do. In her brain she builds scaffolds: _I am so tired of being something you can count on, when you are there and gone again. I wanted you to feel it, just once – what it is when you need someone desperately and they aren’t there for you_. But she knows the words wouldn’t make it out of her mouth. Not in English, her sister-tongue.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. She isn’t sure if she means it.

“I know you are,” Sarah says, like she does. Know. Like she has any idea.

There’s sand in her eyes, Helena tells herself, blinking rapidly. That’s why her eyes are tearing up. Just sand. Just this heat. Nothing else but that.

“I think I see a town,” Sarah says, and Helena turns to the dashboard and looks – there, in the distance, buildings and people and an exit sign. Shade, and cool, and silence.

“Good,” she says. She tells herself she means it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
